A few years ago I participated in 100 Days project. It really is as simple as it sounds. Do something 100 days in a row. Draw, sew, sculpt, write a poem… you get the idea. My last project was to make HST every day. Essex linen background and 101 Kona charm squares. And, I did it. Have I sewn the HSTs together? Not yet, but I will, soon.
I have been mulling over doing it for this year. The next 100 days, I most certainly will be home. I also have been interested in temperature quilts for a while, and indeed the MQG had a webinar on it this past week. Don’t know what a temperature quilt is? Imagine making some sort of quilt block with colors representing the high and low temperatures for that day. It could be for the same location all year, or where you happen to be. You get to make the rules! There are thousands of them here on Instagram. If I started today and did my 100 days, chances are I could keep it up for the rest of the year. My thoughts ran to what fabric to use and I realized that I have this stack of 25 solid Art Gallery fat quarters that I see whenever I look at my stash. At first I thought of using flying geese on a roll that I have. But there were a few issues with it. I probably would need an additional roll if I was to do it for all year… plus since the geese would finish at 3″ by 6″ the quilt would wind up big and I really don’t need or want to make another big quilt right now. And then I thought about how much fabric I would need, and the uncertainty of how much of which colors. That all led me to the idea of doing this small scale, table runner size. I use runners on the kitchen table and the dining room table and often on a coffee table, so it certainly would be used.
Today is the official start of the project, so I got up this morning and started to make a spreadsheet. I love me a good spreadsheet! I first looked at the range of temps where I live to see if I could do one color for a three degree spread. I don’t know how low the temps will go this year, or how high, but down to the teens and up to 100 degrees F would not be a record breaker. That would use almost 30 colors, so I went to 4 degrees per color. I lined up my colors and assigned each temperature range a color.
I then cut out labels and pinned them onto the fabric.
And when I did that I noticed something that I had not noticed before. Art Gallery labels their solids on the selvage. Yay! I usually have to label them myself.
The free flying geese templates that I found online from A Quilter’s Cache don’t print out at what they said they would, no matter how I played with the printer settings, but as long as the templates are all the same, it doesn’t matter. So I started and collected the high and low temperatures from yesterday and and made my first flying geese block.
And so I am off and running with my 2021 100 Day Project. While setting up the spreadsheet I wondered if I ever would get a day when the high and low temps didn’t vary more than 4 degrees, and even within one category. Strangely enough, today might be that day. For the most part the temp varied between 29 and 31, all within the aero blue category, but checking more closely it dipped down to 28 briefly, eliminating the chance of a solid block, at least for today!
Tinking along 